


Memory of Glass

by sam_erotica



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 16:04:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sam_erotica/pseuds/sam_erotica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even after all this time, my hands are still eager for him… </p><p>This work originally written in 2004. ~~~~~ denote flashbacks.  Inspired by the song “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan. (The lyrics can be found at http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/tangled-blue.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I’ve been waking up earlier and earlier these days. Sometimes my eyes open just before the sun breaks over the horizon, and I can see its yellow brilliance threatening to creep in through my window. In the brightening hours of the morning I yawn and stretch in place, feeling the cool sheets grow warm under my searching hands. My searching hands. Even after all this time, my hands are still eager for him, but that side of my bed is as empty as it has been all these years since we went our separate ways. 

Orlando is not here. 

But mornings like this one always bring him to mind – early sunshine warming my skin as he would have done upon the first sign of waking. We would roll into each other, bodies needing each other before even a word was spoken. Or I would gather him to me after we had showered, all scrubbed skin and lanky limbs, and take him on the bathroom counter. Hands against the steamed mirror, we would come together wildly, and then carry out the rest of the day with secret smiles on our faces. Some days I can still see our handprints in the mirror, when it’s frosted with steam and moisture - his hands and mine, imprinted in the memory of the glass.

_~~~~~_

“ _I’m ready for you, Viggo. Don’t make me wait so long this time.”_

_Leaning over the cool dampness of the tiled counter, he locked his smiling eyes with mine in the frosted mirror. He had kicked open a low cupboard door and propped one foot on its top, opening himself to me as I explored him with water-warmed fingers. He handed me the familiar flip-topped bottle, and I coated myself with its contents, massaging my erection in anticipation._

“ _You are a vision,” I told him through the steam, my voice sounding far away even to my own ears. His frame trembled slightly with amusement, then one hand flattened into the mirror and the other reached back to pull me toward him, inside him. His hot sigh mingled with the moisture in the air, my lips caressed the back of his neck._

_Before long we were moving in frantic synchronicity, my body wrapped around his. All four of our hands pressed flat into the condensation on the mirror – mine, his, his, mine. His neck smelled like shampoo, tasted faintly sweet when he said “Bite my neck, Vig, hard,” and I did, just before he cried out and the echo of our orgasms surrounded us._

_~~~~~_

When we first met, Orlando and I were polar opposites. Our friends couldn’t understand what drew the sparkling young man to the brooding artist; even the ones who tried to understand eventually shrugged their shoulders in defeat. That seemed to be the first, but not the last, of our problems. I wasn’t a woman, I didn’t have any money – in his family’s eyes I was questionable. His parents threw him out one night after returning home from stargazing with me, cheeks flushed and lips swollen from my feverish kisses. Within the space between us, though, our lives seemed perfect. It was so easy to invite him to stay with me. Even now, lying here in my bed after all this time, I can still taste our idealism like ripe cherries, sweet and tart on my tongue. 

But like reckless children, we would jump in a car with no plan, no map, just lead feet and bad music and the thought that we could drive forever. We might have, or at least until we hit the Pacific Ocean. We didn’t, and I’d like to say that I can’t remember why, that it doesn’t matter now anyhow. But I remember everything like it was yesterday.

_~~~~~_

“ _I love the way your skin tastes,” Orlando whispered to me. “Right after you come.” He tickled me gently with his tongue – arm, shoulder, earlobe, neck, nipple, navel – and massaged my cock, already stiffening again._

“ _What about right before?”_

“ _I love that too, but it’s different. Really. It’s ... muskier.”_

_We were tangled together, languid limbs melting into blue sheets as the sun made its way lower in the sky. Columns of fading evening light fell through the crack in the curtains, hitting the terrible motel carpet and softly dispersing into it. I wanted him inside me once more. I wanted to make love all night._

“ _I need you again,” I moaned, as his lips found my other nipple. The sweat was still wet on our skin, and I could still feel the beautiful ache of his entering me for the first time, earlier that day. I knew I would feel truly naked without his body on mine, without our sticky limbs pressed together. “Tell me you don’t have to go.”_

_His sigh spiraled over my chest like an ocean breeze. “You know I do,” he said, sadness unmistakable in his voice. And I did know. “But not yet. We still have time for this ...” ... a gentle swipe of his teeth over my nipple, his thumb over my erection._

“ _And this?” I asked, pulling him up to straddle my hips._

“ _Yes. And this.” His hands cradled my face, bringing our lips together as he guided our sex-soaked bodies to each other again._

_~~~~~_

And then he was gone. In the crisp dark of early morning we left, with me headed towards Seattle where a job awaited me, and he headed for a bus home. The car we left right where it was, a defeated shell of its former self. Even as the shuffling of my boots on wet pavement grew louder in my ears, I could hear him call out, his voice like a warm blanket around my shoulders.

“We’ll meet again someday, you know,” he promised. “I’ll be looking for you on the avenue.”

I smiled, and nodded, knowing he was right. I still know it. Even after all the lonely days up north where I lost track of so much time, and the impulsive flight to Louisiana where I lived my father’s seafaring life, I was never free of thoughts of Orlando. It was his voice in the wind that billowed in our sails, his face in the moonlit crests that gently rocked our vessel as we pulled in the nets. 

He has never escaped my mind.


	2. Memory of Glass

I’m constantly surprised at how city lights blind me to the constellations, although I should be used to it by now. The pulse of traffic rushes past me in a familiar rhythm, my feet solid and still on the concrete, my eyes fighting to focus on the Greek script that makes up the night sky. Through the incandescent haze I spot what could be the legs of Orion the hunter, twinkling sword hanging from his belt, loyal dog at his feet. I shift my gaze to the east to catch a glimpse of Orion’s nemesis, but Scorpius is nowhere to be seen.

Draco was always Orlando’s favorite – the tangled guardian of the garden of Hesperides. Its glow is gentle, and easily obscured by city lights. But on a clear country night, Orlando would extend his arm toward it, and then look at me with light years twinkling in his eyes. Tonight all I see is the gray haze of street lights and headlights, and a storm cloud opening, and Orlando’s smile in the sky. 

_~~~~~_

_The threat of rain melted into the reality of a downpour in a matter of minutes. I headed for the nearest doorway, a rain-slicked hand shielding my eyes. For a moment as I caught my breath that doorway was the whole world, the weathered wood warm on my back, the unfamiliar sound of life and conversation seeping out around the edges. I hadn’t really spoken to anyone in days. Then the door opened and I tumbled inside, the torrent closing in behind me._

_Music and smoke and laughter surrounded me as I let my eyes adjust to the dark. I felt suddenly warm, and quiet. I wanted to hide, and sank into a triangle of darkness near to an empty pool table. The vinyl of the seat was cool, and the beer I had ordered appeared in front of me with a frost on the glass that captured my fingertips._

_For a few placid moments I let the amber liquid swirl down my throat and watched, just watched. The bar was full and I felt invisible, the drumbeat pulsing through my limbs and shaking my stomach like a nervous kid. The woman on the stage moved languidly to the music. Two bartenders worked at once behind a crowded bar, arms flying like magicians in a spotlight. My skin tingled. One of them looked so familiar, even from across the room. Something in the face, the strong cheekbones, awakened the butterflies in my stomach and the sharp claw of memory in my chest. He must have felt the heat of my stare and looked my way. Time slowed, and stopped._

_Orlando._

_He watched me watch him - forehead creasing, hair much shorter than I remembered - then smiled and headed toward my dark corner. He stood for a moment next to my chair, his knowing smile sizzling on my skin. And when he spoke, his voice was tender and caressed my ears like it always had._

“ _Don’t I know your name?” he asked me softly, not needing my answer._

_~~~~~_

Since then, I’ve done what I always do; I just keep on keeping on. It’s what I have only ever known how to do. I grew up in a basement apartment on Montague Street, and I still remember so much of it. The light green walls, the plants struggling for sun on the windowsill, the neighbors talking and laughing out front. We were happy there, for a time, in that neighborhood so full of life and music and possibility. The smells from the café up the street filled our own kitchen. But when I was still young enough that I didn’t understand what happened, we lost everything. The soul behind my father’s eyes disappeared, and every day he walked a little slower, a little smaller in his clothes. The warmth of my mother’s embrace faded as she gradually sold everything to get by, and I fell backwards into myself. 

_~~~~~_

_Orlando was living in a basement apartment under the topless bar where I had hidden from the rain. He laughed when I asked him about his job there, saying only “I can do my job in relative peace, man. Almost nobody hits on a gay bartender in a strip club.” Almost._

_I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he leaned back on the counter next to the stove, heating water for tea then lighting two cigarettes in the blue flame of the burner and passing one to me. The pale skin on my hand tingled as his fingers brushed mine; my blue eyes met his chocolate ones, still so familiar, still achingly beautiful. My heart stopped at the warmth of his skin, my cock jumped at the sudden memory of him in my arms before the hiss of the tea kettle brought us back._

“ _Here,” Orlando said without breath, opening a well-weathered book and handing it to me before turning back to the steaming stove. “I love that one. I bet you’ll like it too.”_

_It was one in a collection of sonnets, pages soft and worn at the edges. I read the poem delicately, letting the words wash over me as if they were Orlando’s own. The passion on the page glowed like the Northern Lights and poured out onto me, burning me, and in that moment it was all I wanted._

“ _You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,_  
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,  
in my first vagrant youthfulness,  
when I was partly other than I am,  
  
I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,  
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,  
between vain hope and vain sadness,  
in those who understand love through its trials.   
  
Yet I see clearly now I have become  
an old tale amongst all these people, so that  
it often makes me ashamed of myself;  
  
and shame is the fruit of my vanities,  
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge  
of how the world's delight is a brief dream.”

 

_And then he was there in front of me, his lips so close I could already taste the tobacco on them. A slight sheen of sweat glistened on his brow as he removed the book from my disbelieving hand and set it on the table._

“ _I know you can’t stay,” he whispered, brows creasing, arms circling my waist like snakes. “I know that you are on your way to somewhere else.” His lips were soft and moist on my own. “But don’t tell me so yet. We still have some time together, right?”_

_My fingers felt hot and swollen as they framed his face. “Yes, always,” I rasped, the back of his skull a welcome weight in my hands. “I saw you in the stars tonight. We will always have time.”_

_There were no more words. I just followed him to his bed blindly, hoping for the chance to show him what my voice couldn’t seem to express. I wanted my breath in his ear to say “Oh, damn, I’ve missed you,” my hands on his back to mean “Let’s never be apart again.” That Italian poet on the kitchen table said it first: To be able to say how much you love is to love but little._

_He melted under me with a sigh that spiraled around his whole body. As we were freed from our clothing by fervent fingers, I felt nothing but the parts of me that touched him – my mouth and tongue against his ear, his soft hand on my hardening cock, our ankles entwined, my fingers opening him slowly. All our time apart faded quickly when I entered him, his familiar heat enveloping me once more. I moved slowly inside him, then faster, and then there was no me separate from Orlando. We would always have time._

_~~~~~_

Now I am on my way back east, back to him again, this time for good. As the bus hums and shakes in a hypnotic rhythm, my memory of Orlando is as clear a picture as ever in my mind. The memory is as solid as glass, even on this stormy night with clouds in the sky and rain on my shoes. Sometimes it seems that everyone else I’ve ever known has been just a ghost – a transparent fantasy, a creation of my own imagination. But Orlando tumbled unexpectedly into my life and has never left. The knowledge within me is certain - even with uncounted miles and unknown lives between us, we would always come back to each other. We would always have time.


End file.
